Book Week Paper Bag Princess

Term 3 is my favourite term during the school year!

Term 1 is all about finding out everything you can about your families and students - what they like, know, react and how they best learn.

Term 2 is reports - enough said

And Term 4 is just so busy between reports and getting organised for the end of the year. It is still a great term just not my favourite!

But Term 3 is wonderful

By this stage everyone knows each other REALLY WELL and there are so many fun events happening!

It is a busy term but a fun one!!! J

So in true Term 3 form the past two weeks have been HETIC!!!

I have been in and out of the classroom so much lately - which I actually hate!

By the time Friday rolled around all I wanted was to be alone with my kids because I just missed spending time with them!

I didn’t go to the staffroom, I didn’t go talk to fellow teachers, I didn’t leave my classroom unless ABSOLUTELY necessary for instance toilet breaks!!!

Tuesday was Book Week - my favourite day of the year!!!! J

This year I went with my peer teachers as the Paper Bag Princess!!!!

From bed hair to  the perfect tangled hair princess!!!!

If you have not read this book to your class I highly recommend it!!!!

After we have read the story we write letters to Ronald explaining why he is not a good and what he can do to be a better friend! :)

All you need is a brown lunch bag and a tempate for the princess head and hands!

I like to use the template you can find HERE at My Activity Maker

Hope you all have a super week  - make the most of this flying by term with your kids!!!! :)

Big Book Q&A

This term in Writing we have been learning all about Narratives!

We have been looking at the elements of a narrative using the Diana Rigg narrative structure. We have examined well known narratives looking at these elements in each book.

One element in particular is lots of fun but hard for little minds to get around sometimes. That element is characters thoughts and feelings. The feelings part is okay but the thoughts seem to be the area they struggle just a little. We always have so many questions!!!

I decided the best way to help my students understand a character’s thoughts would be to ask a character!!!

Now I know this in nice in theory but impossible when using fictional characters!!

So I went with the next best thing ….I dressed up as a character so my class could ask how I felt and what I thought throughout the story.

We had been reading Possum Magic (a personal favourite) in class that week so I put my best ‘nanna’ on and dressed up as Grandma Poss!

I am not going to lie it was a little concerning how much I could pass for a Grandma!!!! Hee hee

My students came in and were allowed to ask Grandma Poss any question that related to the story particularly about how she felt and what she was thinking about the story!

My little fish were bursting with excitement!!!!

They came up with many great questions! As expected one of the questions for Grandma Poss was to do some bush magic so she made a puppet owl appear ….from inside her sleeve ;)

After we finished our Q&A we shared some light morning tea.

Of course our snacks consisted of vegemite sandwiches and lamingtons . . . 

after all we didn’t want any of them to turn invisible! ;) hee hee

Making Maths Just A little More Fun

I am going to say a honest truth …

Maths is often the type of subject you love or hate.

In primary school I enjoyed Math because I understood it but when I got into high school I really struggled with Math and consequently had a really negative attitude towards it.

As we all know Maths come into our lives every day so it is SO IMPORTANT that kids enjoy math so they do not switch off!!!

In light of this - it is my life mission to have as many (if not ALL) students in my class loving math!!!

What I am about to say is not anything new but I cannot stress enough how important and rewarding it is to go through a topic using the: concrete to pictorial to abstract phases but it can be hard due to a number of factors including:

Resources - 3 classes makes resource availability not easy but I have two super star peer teachers so we manage!

Students - to be able to handle manipulatives students need to learn clear routines, how to share and how to look after resources.

Time - that’s a big one! I feel like the war will be won but I will keep fighting! ;)

Despite the challenges the process is well worth the benefits but it can be hard to fit it in within the teaching time of a lesson. 

There are many different ways to spice up a maths lessons these are my small tips to make maths as fun as possible. . .

Dance and Sing

Dance and sing at any and EVERY opportunity possible!

It is very easy to sing and dance during a lesson by warm up to some skip counting or place value videos but it can further than that!

You can sing your lesson objective or make up songs and chants to go with a particular topic!

When we looked at patterns we did the chicken dance!!

There are plenty of YouTube clips for many math concepts if you don’t want to make up your own ones!

One of my good teacher friends teachers Pre-Primary and she sings songs to teach sight words like ‘the’ and ‘because’!

ACTIONS ACTIONS ACTIONS

As far as I am concerned anything that gets people moving is a GREAT thing!

I am very big on kinaesthetic activities - as an adult I find it hard to sit still for longer than 5 mins so I try my best to keep my kids moving as much as possible!

Actions are great to go along with a verbal and/or visual message!

They just provide another way to receive and more importantly remember a message.

I usually team actions up with my WALT and WILF so it becomes easier to remember!! J

Bring the Magic

Some  people hate gimmicks but I LOVE them!

I love themes!!

I love puns!!!

I love FUN! J

It doesn’t need to be a big huzzah!!!  I honestly think it is the little things that make a lesson exciting!

Dress up!

Serving up some synonyms come as a chef!

Looking at a particular story book - dress up as a character!

Pick a theme!

Buy some plastic tongs, bowls and salad tossers for centres to create an instant picnic theme!

Pirate theme for mapping!

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs for a chance unit!

Use manipulatives!

Not just math manipulatives - use toy animals as counters or pasta as a base ten and ones! Food is a great one! Use cookies and cereal to represent multiplication arrays!

Get creative!!!! Think outside the square!!! Pinterest is your friend here people!

  Learning Can Be Fun!

Sometimes it is about the process over the product. Not every lesson requires a worksheet.  You can show what you know in multiple ways!

• Paint!
• Draw a picture!
• Use Playdough
• Take photos!
• Play games!
• Cook something!

How do you make maths more exciting?!?! I would love to hear your ideas! :)

Sentence Expansion

It's Friday!! It's Friday!!! Got to get blogging on Friday!!! ;)
Well as I have already made abundantly clear it is Friday and on Fridays I party and by party I mean take naps ;) So before I collapse into a slumber I thought I would share a little bit about  how we work on our sentences in our class :)

Sentence Correction

To assist with students transfer of knowledge from short term to long term memory we do sentence correction which is based on the spelling rule/s we have previously covered together in class. I will often also include errors in grammar and punctuation for example missing capitals from proper nouns our not including an end mark at the end of the sentence. 

Sentence Expansion

Now that we are half way through the year and we have previously looked specifically at all the elements that make up a sentence... we are now looking at how to expand our sentences which is perfect as we are starting our narrative writing genre this term!


To help support my little kiddos I created a PowerPoint that takes them through a specific process to expand their simple sentences.

On the first day we read the simple sentence and copy it down as our title for the week. 

The man cut down the tree. 

1. We then write the sentence and strengthen the noun in yellow or orange pencil to be a specific noun i.e. turning girl into princess. 

The lumberjack cut down the tree. 

2. The next day we rewrite the sentence this time strengthening the verb by making the verb less common i.e. changing run to sprinted.

The lumberjack chopped down the tree.

3. On the third day we add ADJECTIVES to help paint a vivid picture for our reader!!!!

The strong and hard working lumberjack chopped down the tall, old, oak tree. 

4. After that we added an adverb to describe the verb in the sentence!

The strong and hard working lumberjack swiftly chopped down the tall, old, oak tree. 

5. On the last day we add detail to our sentence by thinking about:

• Where are they going?
• When did this happen?
• Where did this occur?
• Why did they do this?

One sunny day a strong and hard working lumberjack swiftly chopped down a tall, old, oak tree in the nearby forest so he could use the wood to light a fire.  

In the end it looks a little something like this in their books!

If you want to grab the PowerPoint I made FOR FREE just jump over to my TPT store by clicking on the TPT social button above!!! 

Well I am off to do some prep for next week! 

I am super excited about teaching Maths next week because we are beginning to look at early multiplication!! I really LOVE teaching multiplication strategies!! :)

Have a great week Y'all!!!! :)

Handwriting

Hey Y’all!

I'm back from two camps and just finished the first week of term three! Talk about three weeks of crazy busy!!!! Then on the flip side of being crazy busy is the fact that now week one is already done I really only have 19 weeks left with my little fishes!

They will be gone before I know it!! :(

I did miss them over the holiday but that first week back is always a mission!!!

Between trying to juggle reinforcing rules, building skills back up to where they were left and not making it a full on week so they have time to readjust back to full time school I'm spent! 

Most times I felt like my students were just like this ....

The great news is I found this awesome website called GoNoodle! I am sure everyone else already knows about it and I am just behind in the times but geez this was a life saver this week! Whenever the kids seemed to be getting restless we put on a song, had a dance and then got back to our learning.

I particularly love MooseTube!!! It is so catchy I am still singing the songs and it is the weekend!!!

If you havn’t checked it out DO IT NOW!!! It is a wonderful resource and best of all sign up is free!!!

This week I really tried to restart our handwriting lessons because they started to fall away last term.

I’m going to be honest handwriting is not my most favourite subject to teach ….. not because I have bad handwriting or anything Personally my handwriting is neat but that is because I am  left handed and I slowly printed my words to avoid smudging it together when I was little. 

I think I find it just so blah. I feel there is not much to do with it to make it highly fun or engaging or at least I havn’t found anything yet.

To spice it up a little I try to add in some gimmicks like having our class pet ‘hoot’ teach the handwriting lesson or writing a silly sentence for the kids to copy.

This week we looked at the letter f quickly.  I decided to write a silly sentence about the deputy principle (who is a male) wearing pink, frilly knickers - the kids were in hysterics! We decided they could change the name of person who loves to wear the knickers ….providing they didn’t write Miss Thresher of course ;)

One little girl wrote about her brother wearing the knickers - ahhhh siblings ;) hee hee

Well I am off to spend some time with my number one girl :)

Information Reports

Well yesterday was the last day of Term 2 and I am now officially on school holidays!!!

In saying that I am a little bit crazy and am going on consecutive Vinnies camps so I am actually only a free elf for 1 day but 1day is way better than no day!!

This term we have been looking at non-fiction texts during our big book time and information reports. I decided to incorporate animals as much as I could because my class just LOVE animals especially sharks!!! - Surprise! Surprise!

This year I only had 6 weeks in total so was quite fast tracked.

At the beginning of each writing lesson we go through our structure warm up!

We then go into writing!

Below is a basic outline of my teaching topics:

	Topic	Teaching
Week 1	African Elephants	Breakdown of the structure Structure cut and glue Examining an exemplar of an information report Examining the grammatical features of an information report.
Week 2	Dugongs	Creating an exemplar text together about our class animal Dugongs
Week 4	The Great White Shark	This week we researched information together, then I modelled a paragraph and they had a go at changing my information a little and inserting their own.
Week 5	My Alien	This week students had a go at writing their own report about an alien they created. I modelled sections about my alien and then they wrote about their own alien.
Week 6	Free Choice (Animal)	This week students wrote their reports independently without any modelling. I decided to link in our knowledge about non-fiction texts and reports to create a non-fiction book about their chosen animals.

This was the first year we created books as examples of information books and I love it! I will b doing this every year because it was just so much fun - for both me but more importantly the kids!

Here is what we did…..

1.      1. First students picked their animals and I recorded what it was so I could find books and information about their chosen animal!

2.      2. Then I brought in animal books galore which he students went through to find their information. I gave them a quick reference guide to fill in with guiding words such as the animal’s habitat.

3.      3. Next we began constructing our book. During each writing lesson students completed one page of their book. They made sure to include a heading, a paragraph of information and a labelled diagram, map or sketch.

4. Finally once the report part of the book as finished we began looking at the other features of a no fiction text to include. We created a cover and a contents page telling people what page each chapter of information was on.

5.      I extended a few students in the class to include a glossary page. They went through their text and outlined words in black text they thought readers may not understand. They then used dictionaries to write the definitions on the back.

      To keep up the motivation we made dioramas of our animals in their natural habitats!

Next term we are going to invite all the parents into class to read our texts and look at our habitats! We are all very nervous but excited!!! Now I just need to find a way to display their habitats because they are currently sitting on my classroom floor!

I have made up an information reports packet which you can grab from my TPT store by clicking here

Well I am off to get ready for my first camp! Happy Holidays Everyone!!! J